Dispatch from Korea

“For American readers, literary evocations of Korea have come, for the most part, in the form of dystopian novels written by people without any direct connection to the country.” Ed Parkon reading Dalkey Archive Press’s series Library of Korean Literature, launched in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

Bruna Dantas Lobato
is an intern for The Millions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Ploughshares online, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is currently the assistant fiction editor for Washington Square Review. She tweets at @bdantaslobato.

"Maybe Gnossos, had [Richard] Fariña lived long enough for a sequel, would have wound up on a commune in Canada, nibbling feta and blissed out on retsina, exhaling paregoric joints in some lush and fragrant garden ... But he died in his twenties, like a lot of energetic young men of his era. It was the kind of romantic death we feel we understand almost too well, a promising talent suspended, that sense of exemption he wrote about—from mediocrity, from bourgeois compromise and midlife disappointment—a membrane forever intact." On the enduring joys and exuberant voice of Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is getting the musical treatment, and though "it does not seem the most likely candidate to provide musical fun for all the family" for a long list of reasons - "heavy drinking, prostitution, a double axe murder and hours of psychological torment" - we're already planning our trips to Moscow for the premier. This is also a good opportunity to revisit the debate over who's greater, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?